Who Could Have Known About Lin?

The following comes from the talented Greg Steele (aka the Man of Steele). Greg normally writes about the Houston Rockets but as Rockets GM Daryl Morey decided to comment on Jeremy Lin, Greg felt compelled to reply.

It’s not often that a polished Harvard grad gets the short end of the stick. Yet that’s precisely what happened to one graduate of that distinguished institution. Jeremy Lin completed his four-year career at Harvard and prepared to enter a career with extremely high salaries. Despite his pedigree, Lin was not able to catch on in the business for an entire year after graduation.

Of course, Lin’s chosen career field was fairly exclusive: he chose to go into professional basketball. Although Lin accumulated a Position-Adjusted Win Score of 12.96 in his senior year at Harvard, he went undrafted in the 2010 NBA Draft. The average PAWS of college players selected in the NBA Draft is 10.18, so it seems relatively clear that Lin was a good prospect. However, there are two extenuating circumstances:

College productivity does not always lead to NBA productivity

Lin played in the Ivy League, midmajor or minor conference, and therefore faced weaker competition than many of the players who were drafted

Factor 1) above applies to all prospective rookies, not just Lin, so we’ll set it aside for now. Now, on to factor 2). Let’s say we discount Lin’s PAWS by 10% to account for the fact that his competition was fairly weak. While we’re at it, let’s also discount Lin’s productivity by another 10% to reflect the fact that he entered the draft pool as a senior, and thus had less potential to improve than younger players. So, if we go ahead and discount 20% of Jeremy Lin’s collegiate productivity, he is left with an Adjusted Position-Adjusted Win Score of 10.38 – still above the average production level of an NBA player in college. Actually, there’s no way we should even have an unofficial metric whose acronym is APAWS, since that sounds more like an endearing term for someone’s grandfather than a basketball metric. Instead, let’s call this second number Jeremy Lin’s Prospect Estimate.

Still, nobody saw Jeremy Lin until the past week. In each of his last four games, Lin has scored at least 23 points and handed out at least 7 assists, substantially bolstering the Knicks’ fortunes. In 209 minutes this year, Lin has recorded a 0.256 WP48, well above the level a star player achieves over the course of a season. Still, 209 minutes is a small sample size. How else could we have seen Jeremy Lin coming?

Well, last year Arturo came up with some absolutely smashing rookie performance prediction models (Editor’s note: More detail on that here) . These models, based in part on college performance and in part on preseason numbers, predicted that Lin was a good prospect, with a rookie year WP48 predicted to be somewhere between .055 and .090.

Though Lin only played 285 minutes last season, he managed to produce .157 wins per 48 minutes during that playing time, so I guess you could say that Arturo saw Jeremy Lin coming.

Still, surely Lin was only on the radar of the Wages of Wins network. Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey, who signed and then waived Jeremy Lin without ever letting him play in a regular season game, said that nobody saw him coming. The New York Knicks don’t seem to have had very high expectations for Lin, since they acquired Baron Davis specifically in order to share the point guard position with Toney Douglas. Obviously the Golden State Warriors didn’t see him coming, since they waived him after last season. It would seem that we have to figure that the Knicks were lucky. After all, nobody really saw him coming.

So here’s someone who was interested in Jeremy Lin in August of 2010. Okay, I give up on the thesis that nobody saw Jeremy Lin coming. Even in the blogosphere, some people thought Jeremy Lin was a viable NBA player. Let’s shift to another question. How could anyone see Jeremy Lin coming? His sample size in the NBA is so small, what other numbers, besides his college performance, can we use to evaluate Jeremy Lin?

In 636 minutes in the D-League last year, Lin put up a 0.211 WP48, totaling 2.8 wins produced. So, even when we search long enough to find a statistically significant sample size (more than 400 minutes), we still find that Jeremy Lin was a good prospect. If only he had gone to Duke instead of Harvard, maybe he would’ve been a household name before last week.

On the other hand, maybe nobody could’ve seen him coming. At the very least, it’s unlikely anyone would predict a young player playing so well in their first four starts. Either way, New York scores … on accident.

15 Responses to "Who Could Have Known About Lin?"

“A year after the legendary PG draft of 2009, the pickings for playmakers are going to be thin. That doesn’t mean there won’t be a player or two who surprise the experts though. The best candidate to pull off such a surprise might be Harvard’s Jeremy Lin. The reason is two numbers Lin posted, 2-point FG pct and RSB40. Lin was at .598 and 9.7.”

You are forgetting the other small sample size that Jeremy Lin was a part of: Asian American basketball players. Lets not dance around the fact that Jeremy faced some bias from those who were evaluating him because he was Asian. Nobody is as good as he has been in games without doing it first in practice, but I suspect NBA personnel guys always had some doubt as to whether he could do it in games simply because he is Asian. That or they thought he could do it, but were afraid of public scrutiny if he fails. Give a one and done college prospect a shot and he fails people will just say he wasn’t ready or he wasn’t mature enough to handle the pressure. Give a Harvard graduate who happens to be Asian and if he fails people will question what you were thinking. I do not mean to make this a discussion or race, but I truly believe most decision makers in sports are far to afraid of outside criticism for trying something new and/or different.

Shawn,
Nice! Yeah it’s surprising how people that just view the numbers saw Lin coming but those that use “traditional” methods of evaluating talent did not. It’s funny that in the face of this fact they are more interested in saving face.

To be fair to Morey, he evidently signed him in the hope that he’d be able to compete for the Rockets’ backup PG spot. He was signed before the vetoed trade went down. That would have sent Goran Dragic to NOLA and made either Flynn or Lin the backup for Lowry. When the trade didn’t happen, the Rockets instead turned to signing Samuel Dalembert, which left Lin as one of two players on the Rockets (the other being forward Jeff Adrien) with a non-guaranteed contract. Faced with cutting either the guard (and the Rockets have plenty) or the forward (a position of need), the Rockets chose to cut Lin.

Morey’s point that no one could have foreseen Lin’s play was more that no one could have foreseen him playing this well. I thought he could be a decent player when the Knicks picked him up, the best PG on that roster, but I didn’t expect him to do this. Anyone saying they expected him to do this is probably misremembering their own predictions, I suspect. The PAWS point is a good one, however.

a lot of point guards reap more than the statistics they would pick up on other teams and from other offenses

I think, if what you care about is per game stats, he’s correct. If nothing else, a PG that plays for D’Antoni – a coach who traditionally plays his better players heavier minutes and who plays at a fast pace (3rd currently) – then a PG will, indeed, “… reap more than the statistics they would pick up on other teams and from other offenses”. I think the point is true almost from pace alone.

Some of the other points he definitely doesn’t justify, but that point seems reasonable.

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